Forest Brothers

The Forest Brothers were Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian partisans who resisted the Soviet occupation of the Baltics from 1940 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1956 during and after World War II. The Forest Brothers were composed of loosely-organized resistance movements which fought against the Red Army following the 1940 annexation of the Baltic states by the USSR, and 50,000 residents of the Baltics hid in the forest and fought Soviet occupation. The insurgency ended around 1956, and the Forest Brothers were exterminated by 1960, fifteen years after the end of World War II.